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December 24th, 2011 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda WEDNESDAY, Dec. 21 (HealthDay News) — Life expectancy is a topic
many disabled seniors want to talk about with their doctors but very few
have that discussion, a new study finds.
It included 60 elderly patients with an average age of 78 who had
multiple illnesses and disabilities and lived in a community-based,
long-term care program in San Francisco. None of the patients had been
diagnosed with a specific terminal illness.
Interviews with the patients revealed that 75 percent would want a
conversation about their prognosis if their doctor felt they had less than
a year to live, while 65 percent would welcome such a dialogue if they
likely had fewer than five years to live.
However, only one of the 60 patients reported having such a discussion
with a doctor, said the researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center
and the University of California, San Francisco.
Wanting to prepare for death, making the most of their remaining time
and making medical or life decisions were among the most common reasons
the patients gave for wanted to discuss their prognosis.
“When physicians bring up prognosis, it’s usually thought of as a
health issue, but for the person on the receiving end, the conversation is
about a lot more than that,” lead author Cyrus Ahalt, a geriatrics
research coordinator in UCSF’s Department of Medicine, said in a
university news release.
“We’ve made big strides in changing the way that doctors communicate
prognosis to patients who have cancer, organ diseases or other terminal
diagnoses, but this study shows that we still have room to grow in
discussing life expectancy with frail older adults who have poor prognosis
simply because of multiple physical or cognitive impairments or old age,”
added principal investigator Dr. Alexander Smith, a physician at SFVAMC
and a bioethics expert and assistant professor of medicine in the division
of geriatrics.
The study was published online Nov. 30 in the Journal of General
Internal Medicine.
More information
The AGS Foundation for Health in Aging has more about communication between seniors and their doctors.
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